By Nancy Plum
Some orchestral ensembles keep things light musically during the holiday season — performing pops concerts full of spirited carols and celebratory music. New Jersey Symphony Orchestra has traditionally maintained a more classical approach to this time of year with an annual performance of George Frideric Handel’s oratorio Messiah. Led by Music Director Xian Zhang, New Jersey Symphony brought Messiah to Richardson Auditorium on the campus of Princeton University last Friday night for full-house performance with orchestra, chorus, and four vocal soloists.
Handel’s 18th-century Messiah was by definition an oratorio, with close to 50 choruses, recitatives, and solos or duets tracing the life of Christ in three major sections. When performed in full, the concert can be more than three hours long, and conductors have long taken liberties with dropping numbers from the production. What to cut is often decided by the popularity of certain selections, and this was certainly the case with NJSO’s performance. Much of Part I, depicting the birth of Christ, was intact, but of the more than 30 musical selections comprising Parts II and III, NJSO performed only 16 choruses, recitatives, and arias. Truncating the oratorio to this extent can lose much of the work’s drama and theatricality, but NJSO’s presentation clearly retained the most familiar and popular solos, allowing the vocal soloists the chance to shine.
Friday night’s concert featured a very scaled-down instrumental ensemble, with a small group of strings, pairs of oboes and trumpets, a single bassoon and keyboard continuo accompaniment. Keyboard player Robert Wolinsky was kept particularly busy switching between harpsichord and portative organ, and several principal string players provided expert solo accompaniment in imaginative scoring to certain solo sections.
Zhang and the orchestra began the “Overture” to Messiah in a regal tempo, with relaxed double-dotted rhythms and a lean string sound. With Messiah being such a long work, something often needs to set the performance on fire, whether it be solo singing, fast tempi or musical effects. From the outset, it was clear that what was going to set this performance apart would be variety in dynamics. Zhang consistently built dynamics well within the music and enticed a great deal of dynamic variety from the players. In the first solo aria of the evening, this approach was conveyed especially well by tenor Miles Mykkanen, a Finnish-American singer who lived up to his reputation of having an infinite range of dynamics within his singing. Mykkanen communicated animatedly with the audience in his arias and recitatives, maneuvering through the vocal runs with accuracy. more